I think it was closer to what they need; it comes down to keeping TB of data on local SSD and having a query engine next to it. That takes persistent, shared CPU, caching, sharding, resource management, etc.

Duckdb is an interesting approach to resource management (all ephemeral), but TB's are TB's. I doubt it was finding data where it needed it.

Clickhouse seems slow at getting to the top end of scaling; it's stuck with the 99% of its userbase doing 1 GB queries. I'm hoping they put some of their money into it.